


if i could change the world overnight.

by orphan_account



Series: ateez/tmi au [2]
Category: ATEEZ (Band)
Genre: Alternate Universe — The Mortal Instruments, Gen, M/M, but the plot isn’t even close to malec’s, confessions (??), hongjoong as alec lightwood, mentions of shadowhunter!yunho and vamp!san, my dramatic ass wrote this without eating, seonghwa as magnus bane
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-05-01
Updated: 2019-05-01
Packaged: 2020-02-10 22:41:00
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 3,671
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18669820
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/orphan_account
Summary: “I will have you know,” Hongjoong says, and the sound of his voice, cold as ice and edged like a newly sharpened blade, makes Seonghwa smile, “that I don’t approve of you being here at all.”or: the adventures of shadowhunter!hongjoong and High Warlock!seonghwa





	1. if i would have known that you wanted me,

The Institute has stood directly in the heart of Seoul City for the better part of the last few centuries. It stands, tilted by its own weight, with a polished cross at the roof and a statue of an angel peering from the front. The doors are heavy and rusted, as if they haven’t been used for a while. A raven rests ominously on one of the rooftop, its eyes sweeping past the area periodically. It hasn’t changed much in the past four hundred years, save for the bloodstains on the door handle.

 

Seonghwa doesn’t have a lot of good memories of this place. His visits to the Institute as the High Warlock has mostly just been him making controversial statements and then being told to leave before they use their holy blades to spill his filthy blood. (It’s a horrible bluff — the angel children wouldn’t spill Downworlder blood unless it was on the order of their Clave.) He _does_ remember having to haul San’s freshly undead corpse from the graveyard fifteen odd years ago while the Shadowhunters watched with mild fascination and horror, so there’s that, at least.

 

He knocks on the door only twice, just as instructed. In a second, there is the sound of footsteps.

 

“I will have you know,” Hongjoong says, and the sound of his voice, cold as ice and edged like a newly sharpened blade, makes Seonghwa smile, “that I don’t approve of you being here at all.”

 

Seonghwa likes how he looks when he’s not in his Shadowhunter gear. He looks almost normal without the bow and arrow within his reach.

 

“Is this how you greet all your guests, hunter?” Seonghwa drawls, and judging by the way his heart feels like it’s been dunked in a vat of acid when he watches Hongjoong’s jaw clench, he’s starting to think that San was right about him getting off on making Hongjoong mad. “Or am I just _special_?”

 

“You wish.” He opens the door wider and doesn’t bother asking him to follow. Seonghwa gets it anyway, closing the door quietly and trudging after him. There’s a pause when they’re in the elevator, before Hongjoong gives him a sideways glance “How long are you staying in the city for?”

 

“Just tonight.” Seonghwa watches the elevator move up, head towards the ground. There’s blood on the floor too, crusted and aged. “I have to go to Idris tomorrow. Important Downworlder things.”

 

He’s actually going to Idris to see if he can figure out why people are killing vampires from San’s coven, which he’d strictly been told to _not_ do. There’s tension between everyone now — the Clave seems to think they’re entitled to everything House of Warlocks does since the peace treaty was signed, which made the Coven angry because they were the allies of the House long before the hunters. Seonghwa’s opinion on the whole thing is that the Clave should fuck off so he and San could rule in peace.

 

The elevator screeches to a halt, bright light flooding through the gaps. He follows Hongjoong out and watches the elevator go down. In a brighter light, he can see that Hongjoong has a bruise under his lips and a nick under his eye. He’s still stupidly handsome, and San would say that Seonghwa is right about that.

 

“You’re staring,” Hongjoong says, without looking up from the lock he’s picking at. There’s a burn mark at his wrist where Seonghwa has accidentally burned him on that fateful night on the ship. He hasn’t even bothered bandaging it properly.

 

Seonghwa doesn’t look away. “I’m aware.”

 

It’s hard to believe that it’s been a good five days since Hongjoong kissed him outside the portal to Idris while bleeding out from the claw marks on his arm. Seonghwa hasn’t seen him much in that time, owing to San’s insistence on him taking a look at the dead vampire case and Hongjoong being busy with the amount of injured hunters in the Institute. (His parents aren’t around and the Inquisitor refused to have anything to do with a demon war caused by his own stupidity, so he’s been more or less doing everything on his own.) Either he doesn't remember doing it at all, or is just pretending it never happened for his own peace of mind.

 

He can still taste the desperation on his lips, can still feel the _I don’t want to die yet, don’t let me die_ he’d hissed against the skin of his neck when he’d collapsed, can still remember how the force of Hongjoong against him had forced him to drop the dagger he was holding and clutch onto him, can still remember the way every part of his skin that Hongjoong’s hands had touched left blood on him. It had left him dazed and breathless and wondering what the fuck this innocent game of cat and mouse had turned into.

 

It’s Hongjoong’s voice that brings him back.

 

“Yunho is in the library,” he’s saying, and then makes a vague gesture at the hallway. “Third door to the left. You can’t miss it.”

 

The magical thread that stitched his cuts together are a pale, washed out blue. Seonghwa wonders if he remembers him hauling Hongjoong away from the crowd and putting his skin together before he died.

 

Yunho’s business with him is fairly simple. He’d heard that Seonghwa was seeking a book, one about the dragon pox outbreak of 1986, and decided to give it to him since he felt like he owed his life to Seonghwa. (A foolish feeling — Seonghwa had only helped him out of respect to his mother.) He collects the book, thanks Yunho and makes small talk about if he’s feeling fine these days. Then he leaves, with a careless wave at Yunho’s “May the angels be with you,” because he doesn’t believe in angels, and steps out.

 

Hongjoong is still standing at the hallway when he comes back.

 

“I’ll walk you out,” he says, taking the book from him. Maybe it’s something he does to the countless women who’ve fallen at his feet, but as a four hundred year old warlock who’s lived through wars, the chivalry doesn’t mean much.

 

“You’re being nice to me.” Seonghwa notes, following him back into the elevator.

 

“You did save my life on a port with magic you’re not allowed to practice on mortals,” Hongjoong says, flatly. He shuts the elevator door and presses the button. It makes a guttural noise as it lurches downwards. “I suppose I owe you some courtesy.”

 

He’s wearing the blue sweater that’s exactly the color of the threads. When he holds the book closer, he seems even smaller than he really is.

 

“So you do remember.” The words come out quieter than he intends them to be.

 

“Begging for you to save my life after getting the length of my arm torn off by a poisonous demon on angel steroids? Yeah.” Hongjoong pulls the door of the elevator open and tilts his head. “It’s hard to forget that kind of thing when the fear is embedded in your memory.”

 

Seonghwa is almost out of the elevator when he takes a deep breath, like he’s steeling himself to the ground so he doesn’t backpedal again, and adds, “I remember the rest of it too.”

 

The elevator clicks with a slow, silent drag of metal.

 

And for a moment, it’s just them in the dreary hallway. Seonghwa, the High Warlock of Seoul, in shimmery eyeliner that should never be worn in the house of God, watching Hongjoong, the heir to the Seoul Institute of Nephlim with warlock magic fused into his wound through the blue threads. A well acclaimed Shadowhunter and a warlock who was famous for all the wrong reasons.

 

“I didn’t kiss you because I was delirious from blood loss,” he says, one hand on the elevator and the other clutching onto the book. His eyes look exactly the same as it did the first night they’d met in that upscale house party and he’d held a knife to Seonghwa’s throat, the same as it was on the ship when he’d barreled into the cluster of demons without looking back, and it makes Seonghwa wonder how much he’s thought about this.

 

He can’t bring himself to look away from Hongjoong. “Then why did you do it?”

 

That’s a dangerous question to ask someone in the house of angels. He can lie here, being the child of a demon and all that, but Hongjoong can’t.

 

“I wanted to,” Hongjoong says, without missing a beat, and the words hit Seonghwa like the weight of a thousand daggers. It leaves him feeling a lot like the world has tilted under his feet. As if he’d gone to sleep with all his organs as they should be and woken up to find that his heart is where his liver should be. As if something big had been changed.

 

And it makes sense. Hongjoong admitting that he wanted to kiss him was basically just him giving a name to whatever they had going on with each other. The tension in the room that felt suffocating whenever they talked. All the times they’ve coincidentally happened to meet at conferences and ended up taking the train together even though Seonghwa could easily open a portal for both of them. All the times he’s found himself watching Hongjoong for no reason, and all the times he’s looked at him to find that he was already looking back.

 

“Well, hunter,” Seonghwa starts, after a pause, and thinks his heart is trying to crawl it’s way out of his chest. “You’ve surprised me. I didn’t think you had it in you to admit it.”

 

“I’m not stupid.” Hongjoong shrugs. “I know why I did it. Perhaps asking you to save me and letting my personal issues bleed into that encounter was my problem — ”

 

“I’d have done it anyway.” Seonghwa interrupts. Boundaries are being crushed and stomped on tonight, so he might as well. “I wanted to save you.”

 

Hongjoong’s eyes glow like dying embers in the dim light. Shadowhunters always did have more bravery than they needed in the first place.

 

“When are you coming back from Idris?” He asks, leading him through the narrow corridor and towards the exit. His hands are clenched around the book and his knuckles are turning white.

 

“Sometime next week.” Seonghwa doesn’t know, actually, but he’s not staying in the City Of Angels any longer than he has to, so he’ll just come back whether or not he’s found whoever is killing San’s coven off. “Why?”

 

Hongjoong opens the door. It makes a slight, creaky noise when it does so, sounding more and more like a dying house. He tilts his head slightly and huffs out air from his nose, like he can’t believe he’s doing this.

 

“I want to thank you for saving my life properly,” he says, and Seonghwa hasn’t noticed it before, but there’s red crawling all the way to the tips of his ears when he hands him the book. “Let me take you out.”

 

Seonghwa’s lived for four hundred years. He’s seen shit, from a thousand wars to everyone he’s loved fade away and die and become one with the earth, from the Uprising to the Clave’s disbandment. And yet, Hongjoong is the only thing that’s ever made him felt like hes genuinely taken aback and surprised each time.

 

He can’t help the smirk at his lips when he replies, “That’s a very ambiguous statement. Do you mean on a date or with a knife?”

 

Hongjoong, to his credit, seems to find the humor in it. He smirks, lopsided and confident, and says, “Come back from Idris and then we’ll see.”

 

His hand lingers a second longer when he hands him the book, and for the first time, an encounter where Seonghwa doesn’t know what’s going to happen next doesn’t seem that bad to him.

 

”Seonghwa?”

 

He turns at the threshold, one hand curled around the book and the other limp at his side. Hongjoong flashes him a quick, half smile, gone as soon as it came, and says, “May the angels be with you.”

 

”May the angels be with you too, Hongjoong-ah,” he calls back, and not even the shine of the stars in the night sky compares to the smile he gets in return.


	2. the way i wanted you.

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> San rolls his eyes. “Always so idealistic, Wolf Boy.”
> 
> Seonghwa doesn’t mind it. “It’s not a bad thing. To hope, that is.”

It’s been two days since he’d been unceremoniously imprisoned in a demon realm and shackled to a pole that was slowly draining his energy, and Seonghwa is starting to think that the people around him are going to kill him before the damn pole does.

 

Despite the looming threat of immediate death and destruction that constantly breathed down their necks because of Shadowhunters who had an obsession with  _ purifying the world _ , Seonghwa had never quite become fond of his allies. Objectively, they’re all nice people. He just can’t tolerate them for longer than a day.

 

He’s known San for fifty years, since he dug him up from a grave and taught him to say the name of God without flinching so he could confess to the young warlock he was in love with. He’s fought battles with him, given him a place to stay at when he broke the law (minorly) and had even attended his stupid mortal wedding in a drab suit with no glitter in his hair and given him good wishes, but the truth of the matter was that the less he had to see San, the better he was. San meant trouble, even if he’s grown up from Fledgling brat he used to be, and while Seonghwa appreciates his charm, he’d rather not see him any more than he has to. 

 

And he somehow got even  _ more  _ annoying in distress, never still, pacing left and right at night and then curling into the shadows at daylight. His eyes seemed to never shut, flickering aimlessly at the blessed metal bars on the prison and then at the faeries outside. Then he’d spend whatever was left of his time leaning against the wall and mumbling a prayer to God, as if he  _ wasn’t  _ damned to Hell, and the one name at the tip of his tongue was  _ Yeosang _ .

 

And Jongho is … he’s Jongho. Very handsome, slightly impulsive but also apologetic and quiet and as soft as the youngest werewolf to sign the Accords could be. His fatal flaw was his ability to  _ always  _ assume the worst. If a floorboard rattled, he leapt to his feet and pointed his claws at it. If San said something tasteless, as he often did when he hadn’t had blood in a while or just because he felt the need to be a colossal asshole, he glared at him and asked if he was seeking war. It was a bit much for Seonghwa’s old soul. He just wants some silence so he could shut his brain out.

 

He likes both these people. San is his friend, perhaps not the ideal companion, but when you’re immortal and have the rest of the world wither away at your feet, people like you are all you have left. Jongho had the best interest of the Downworlders in mind, smart and calculated and careful, and while they weren’t  _ friends _ , he supposed he didn’t completely hate him.

 

It didn’t change the fact that he’s utterly sick of them both, though.

 

“Shut up!” He snaps at them, the fifth time they get into an argument about the time forty years ago when San’s grandfather had tried to kill Jongho’s great grandfather over a stupid feud, and nearly slumps over in relief when the silence  _ finally  _ ascends. He feels so  _ old  _ with the two of them and their raging anger.

 

“We’re all going to die, hyung,” San says, sourly from his spot in the shadows. His hair is streaked with dirt and blood and there’s a cut on his cheek, a neat laceration made by a careful knife. He’s tired. So tired that it shows on his face, and had he had a heart, Seonghwa would be acutely aware of it slowing down. “Can I at least go down after winning an argument with him?”

 

Jongho can’t move any more than five feet because of the random bits of silver scattered on the floor. He’s only a boy, maybe as old as San was when he got Turned or maybe even younger, but his eyes speak as if they’ve seen more than he ever should have.

 

_ Hongjoong _ , he thinks, almost on reflex, and just the thought of the name has his fingers turning white against the pole, and even though he feels a sudden jolt of energy being drained away from him, he can’t bring himself to loosen his grip or think of anything else,  _ he looks just like Hongjoong sometimes. _

 

“We’re not dying,” Jongho says, calmly. He’s also hopelessly optimistic. “I’m the head of the biggest wolf pack in the city. Seonghwa-hyung is the High Warlock and I’m willing to bank on the fact that the Nephlim probably have quite a bit they owe to him. San basically runs Manhattan.” His lips curl up, just slightly. “We mustn’t give up. The Clave is probably looking for us.”

 

San rolls his eyes. “Always so idealistic, Wolf Boy.”

 

Seonghwa doesn’t mind it. “It’s not a bad thing. To hope, that is.”

 

“Even if the Conclave doesn’t give a fuck about where we are,” San says, thoughtfully, as if he was considering the optimism Jongho had dared to express, “I’m pretty sure Seonghwa-hyung’s hunter boy has already violated half the Accords looking for him. He’s honestly my last hope.”

 

Seonghwa thinks back to the way Hongjoong had looked like he’d been hit when Seonghwa had asked him for space, thinks of the way his voice had swayed dangerously when he’d asked if this was what he  _ really  _ wanted, and remembers the torn expression he’d been wearing at the Hall of Accords when Mingi had pulled him back by the arm so he wouldn’t do anything he’d regret in front of the Clave as it stood, and the grim memory has him wincing for reasons that aren’t the pole draining him of his energy as he says, “I wouldn’t count on it if I were you.”

 

San’s eyes gleam like bloody diamonds in the shadows, lips curling into a slight smirk. “I  _ did  _ warn you that getting involved with mortals has its downsides.”

 

Actually, he had not. When Seonghwa mentioned that he had this questionable relationship with one of the hunter children that he had yet to put a name to but also found himself really invested in because even if he was vague and shitty at communicating Hongjoong really did make Seonghwa’s stupid, old heart sing, San’s exact words had been,  _ secure that man, whore. _

 

“I highly doubt that,” Jongho says, tone as flat as a slab of concrete in an ice storm. Seonghwa is utterly exhausted, maybe because he’s thinking of Hongjoong and the miserable conditions surrounding their relationship again or maybe because the pole seems to be draining his energy twice as fast or maybe because he hasn’t slept since he got here, so he leans back against the wall and exhales slowly. 

 

There’s the sound of San’s hands curling the ring he wears on his hand. He must miss Yeosang quite a lot, even if he never said it.

 

“I’ve seen the way he looks at you when you’re not looking, you know.” San says, conversationally, and when Seonghwa chances a glance at him, he looks dead serious. “It’s exactly how Yeosang looks at me when we’re passing by mirrors because he thinks I can’t see my own reflection.”

 

Jongho blinks. “Haven’t you been married for over twenty years?”

 

“Time is but a drop of rain to us immortals,” San says, bored. “And my husband is quite dimwitted for a prodigious warlock.”

 

“Didn’t he open the portal to evacuate Idris when the demon attacks started?” Jongho asks again. He’s such a child sometimes. Seonghwa hopes he stays this way for a while, asking stupid questions and being honest to the best of his abilities.

 

“The point is,” San says, waving him away, “he won’t leave you to die here, even if you told him to fuck off and leave you alone because you’re afraid of your own feelings. Yeah, he’s stupid and reckless and I heard he once got poisoned by a Greater Demon and almost died in your arms, but he’s surprisingly genuine about how he feels about you. Give him a chance, warlock. Maybe it won’t be as miserable as you think it is.”

 

Seonghwa watches the peeling paint off the walls, the color fading from the sky. He closes his eyes and thinks of his loft in New York and Red (his cat) ducking under the sofa and the ugly sweater Hongjoong had left on his armchair one night and the stupid way his laugh used to ring through the walls when he allowed Seonghwa to pull him in by the lapels of his coat for a kiss before he departed for good. He thinks of how it had felt like someone had dug away his entire heart from his chest and left it to be washed away by the cruel waves of a raging ocean when he’d uttered the words, “Maybe it’s best if we don’t see each other anymore, Hongjoong-ah,” against what he really wanted, and wishes he could go back in time and fix all that.

 

If he dies here, which, in spite of Jongho’s optimism and San’s efforts, is very likely, the last thing he’ll ever had said to Hongjoong would be a lie.

  
And if he could pick apart a single moment from the four hundred years that he had lived, if he could do one thing all over again, if he could turn the clock  _ just  _ once, he thinks he’ll take the words back, and he’d tell Hongjoong to stay with him because it’s the only place where he’s felt like he’s belonged.

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> i suck at this but will i ever stop? no.

**Author's Note:**

> what’s up fuckers idk how to link shit but my twitter handle is thotael if anyone is curious and wants to ✨ be mutuals and give me clout ✨


End file.
